Nonexistent work referenced: Punta de la espira
Medium: Short story
Extent of manifestation: 17 articles created and edited on http://es.wikipedia.org.
Summary of work: Punta de la espira (English: "Tip of the Spire/Spiral") is apparently a 1951 short story by Gabriel García Márquez. It describes an unnamed protagonist as he sails down a river towards a desolate, "black, horned" mountain in order to deliver a gift to an unspecified recipient. The journey is rough and treacherous, and he dies of exhaustion at the end of the story appearing to be no closer to his goal than when he first began. The mountain is described in detail throughout the story, with recurring metaphors alternatingly alluding to it as either an abode of the gods or a demonic presence.
Nonexistent work referenced: Taitoru (Japanese: タイトル)
Medium: Animated film
Extent of manifestation: 1 article created on http://www.tvtropes.org, with 55 edits made to various trope pages ranging from "Despair Event Horizon" to "Foreshadowing" and "What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made On Drugs?"
Summary of work: Taitoru appears to be an animated film directed by Satoshi Kon shortly before his death. It is described as a psychological thriller chronicling a struggling manga artist as she attempts to complete and publish her first work under a tight deadline. Stress takes its toll and boundaries blur; she begins to hallucinate, and the movie ends ambiguously as to whether she has achieved her goal or succumbed to her weaknesses. Typical of Kon's style, the animation is described as meticulous, kaleidoscopic, and occasionally deeply disturbing; one scene features the protagonist physically grappling with the shadows in her apartment - described under the trope entry for "Your Mind Makes It Real" as the manifestation of her creative block - which eventually engulf and consume her.
Nonexistent work referenced: No Sister of Mine
Medium: Video game
Extent of manifestation: 77 threads on http://forums.somethingawful.com, each carrying between 3 to 103 comments. Most users were established members of the Something Awful community.
Summary of work: No Sister of Mine is supposedly a turn-based role-playing video game of the fantasy/horror genre published by Poakahan for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2005. According to reviewers, the player controls a party of 6 unnamed characters as they explore a ruined kingdom with the intention to find a lost companion referred to as "Sister". It was widely panned by the reviewers, with much criticism being levelled at the glitch-filled battle system, incoherent dialogue, seemingly incomplete graphics, repetitive soundtrack described as "nauseating" and "headache-inducing", as well as being impossible to complete. The game's non-playable characters continuously mention a "coalblack thornbound tome" that, when read from, would enable one to either obtain great power, or unleash a dreadful curse; what most reviewers assumed to be the final quest line required the player to backtrack through the game's previous areas and recover fragments of the tome using their newfound abilities. However, the reviewers unanimously claim that no fragments can be found. One reviewer goes as far as to claim that the items themselves were never found inside the game's coding in the first place.
Nonexistent work referenced: The Scolipendra Wiki
Medium: Collaborative fiction
Extent of manifestation: 49 different pieces of fanfiction (ranging from 343 to 2,401 words in length) posted on http://www.fanfiction.net, each bearing between 1 and 6 comments.
Summary of work: The Scolipendra Wiki is deduced to be an online collaborative fictional universe belonging to the horror, speculative fiction, and weird fiction genres. It appears to have been hosted on some form of wiki site, though the address itself is never mentioned. The exact nature of Scolipendra's plot is hard to discern, as the various pieces of fanfiction sport vastly differing storylines and a range of character interpretations, further complicated by the involvement of other fictional universes and settings. What is known is that it involves a cast of 7 characters wandering between a series of realms, amassing and collecting items possessing supernatural or abnormal properties. One item features heavily throughout the compiled works: a 7-sided obsidian emblem said to possess the power to destroy any object, person, or abstract concept with a single touch. It appears to be of great interest to the protagonists, who repeatedly make attempts to acquire it; however, it also appears to be currently in the possession of a sinister unnamed antagonist who is alluded to repeatedly in several works, yet is never seen.
Nonexistent work referenced: I/O
Medium: Musical album
Extent of manifestation: Review columns in a total of 14 reputable publications, including The New Bombay Times, Pitchfork and L.A. Flipside.
Summary of work: I/O is described as the ninth studio album by the now-defunct English rock band Radiohead. It contains 6 tracks measuring a total of 34 minutes and 18 seconds. The majority of tracks appear to consist mostly of digitally manipulated samples from Radiohead's previous albums, layered over with sparse acoustic instrumentation and vocals. Reception of the album appears to be highly positive, with the exception of Pitchfork's Jessica Greene who gave an average review of 7.0. It is mentioned that the album uses a characteristic grating, binaural reverb layered over lead singer Thom Yorke's solo vocal track as a musical motif, embodying what The New Bombay Times' Gulshan Anirudh believes to be its central themes of "spirals of isolation and inspiration … of feedback loops that resonate into the level of the deeply personal, the trembling core of creative psyche". Anirudh also mentions lyrics referencing suicide and self-harm, though presented through a series of oblique metaphors: I/O "never fears to toy with the idea of self-hatred and self-desecration - yet the album as a whole seems to fall short of its mark, always orbiting yet never quite touching upon the dreadful center."
Nonexistent work referenced: Mavigne, Or: A Treatise On The Metaphysics Of Inner Space Travel, And The Kingdom Of Erikaar, Whose Name Is Darkness Made Light, And Further Theological Expositions Thereof
Medium: Novel
Extent of manifestation: 7 articles published in a single week in various academic journals of literary criticism, each by reputable scholars.
Summary of work: Mavigne is described as the contents of a manuscript and accompanying charcoal illustrations found in the house of a Rithabile Abrahams in 2014. Abrahams appears to have been a reclusive writer and artist working as a maintenance technician in Bloemfontein, South Africa and clinically diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mavigne is a nested frame narrative written in Afrikaans purporting to be a novel by a 17th-century Dutch mystic. It describes the journey of the mystic, whose name is only given as Maas, learning of the structure of the Earth's interior as revealed to him in a vision. At the beginning of the novel, Maas dreams of a supernatural being that is aware of its nature as a dream-entity and is highly indebted to Maas for bringing it into existence. In exchange, it promises to divulge to Maas the secrets of the earth. Maas, being corporeal, is unable to pass through the ground, and so the being decides to simply narrate the journey. It speaks of 6 realms demarcated by thresholds, ranging from the realm of treasure and minerals to an intangible plane of light and sound. Beyond these 6 realms lies another threshold, this time one of cold and silence, which is described to be the Earth's core; before it can be elaborated upon, Maas wakes, and the dream ends.
Nonexistent work referenced: ex lux
Medium: Interactive novel
Extent of manifestation: In-depth posts on 7 different fiction review blogs, along with a mention in a Time magazine article on experimental narrative forms. The title is also mentioned in 175 Twitter posts, largely in the context of recommending it as an interesting, if underrated, piece of interactive fiction.
Summary of work: ex lux appears to be a work of interactive fiction of the mystery genre written in a mixture of English, Catalan, and Spanish. It is presented as a set of epistolary narratives from the points of view of 6 characters and a stream-of-consciousness narration of ambiguous provenance. Readers navigate between the 7 story threads, discovering hints of a murder, or several murders; eventually, the narratives converge at a roadside diner during a thunderstorm, and the characters exchange their stories. From here, the resultant narrative structure cannot adequately be described as simple framing devices or stories-within-stories, as the inner tales eventually begin to intertwine such that later tales shed new light on ones recounted earlier, or themselves link to segments of text earlier on in the narrative after lengthy detours. At several points, characters attempt to consult the testimony of an absent individual, referred to as the Stranger. The identity of the murderer(s) or victim(s) is never known, nor does the story have a conventional ending.
